Listening to my pastor’s Father’s Day sermon yesterday concerning characteristics of a good and godly dad made me take a look back at what we have been groomed to think what a father is supposed to be. When Black folks begin to appear on TV in family settings, usually in the form of a sitcom, we really didn’t care what they were doing - just the fact that they were there was “good enough”. But now that I look back, and even today there were no really good father figures on TV. Even on one of the most successful sitcoms of all times, the Cosby Show, Heathcliff Huxtable was made to look like an idiot at home, even though he was a successful doctor. The children had little respect for him and anytime a real problem came up they went to wife Clair to solve it. And the ridicule of the male image was passed down to the son Theo, who was just as bad or worse.
And you can go down the list of Black sitcom and basically interchange the dads despite their varied social economic status was. There was the longest running Black sitcom, the Jeffersons, where George Jefferson, a successful entrepreneur who worked and “moved on up” from a working class section of Queens into a luxury apartment in Manhattan, by owning seven dry-cleaner stores. And still he was the wacko dad with the goofball son, Lionel and they both needed wife Louise to make sure they behaved. How about Michael Kyle of My Wife and Kids with the stupid son, Junior, kept in line by wife Jay.
Family Matters originally focused on the character of Carl Winslow who was always bailed out by wife Harriette. The producers changed it a hare and gave them a rebellious son Eddie. That didn’t seem to be working so they brought in a nerdy next-door neighbor, Steve Urkel, midway through the first season and he quickly became the focus of the show. Sanford and Son only had dad Fred G. Sanford, a 65-year-old junk dealer living in Watts, and Lamont, his 30-year-old son in the household. Fred was stubborn and argumentative with frequent money-making schemes which backfired and created more troubles. Fred was constantly insulting his son, usually calling him a “big dummy”. Lamont insulted his father also, sometimes referring to him as an "old fool".
There was the Evans family in Good Times. James Evans was father of the buffoon son J.J. and wife Florida worked around the clock “keeping their heads above water”. They lived in the infamous Cabrini-Green projects of Chicago. They killed off James in the fourth season because he was fed up with J.J. character. Then there was Amen where Deacon Ernest Frye, of the First Community Church of Philadelphia was often dishonest and frequently got into trouble with his many harebrained schemes. His 37-year-old daughter, Thelma was in charge of keeping him in line.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with a man intelligent enough to be Judge Philip “Uncle Phil” Banks but made to look foolish by all the children, especially nephew Will Smith. Two foolish men are not enough for the Fresh Prince producers. Son Carlton is ignorant and Will’s friend Jazz is just plain stupid. And do we even to go to Martin Payne and Gina Waters, Martin's more level-headed, long suffering better half, and later his wife. How about The Bernie Mac Show, The Hughleys, House of Payne, and Meet the Browns.
Cartoons even got into it with Oscar Proud with rational and level-headed Trudy Proud with daughter Penny Proud, a 14-year-old who is usually embarrassed by the way her father acts.
As with other sitcoms with a common target audience, TV networks have often scheduled Black sitcoms in blocks on a given night of the week. While this has helped to foster an audience for many of these shows, it has been criticized as creating a "ghetto" for them, where they are less likely to be watched by non-Black viewers who might tune in early for a "White" show they are already interested in, or stay tuned in after another show has finished. In the 2000s, UPN emerged as the most prolific broadcaster of Black sitcoms, scheduling one or two nights of programming each week featuring them.
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